The Séítah region on Mars, strewn with boulders and sand dunes, was too tricky for NASA’s Perseverance rover to drive. So the rover’s small helicopter flew over the area on Monday, taking some photos of a prime location on the other side. In less than three minutes, creativity and perseverance saved the months he would have spent driving to take his own photos.
Monday morning’s quick jump through Séítah was Ingenuity’s ninth flight to the surface of Mars so far, but it was the first time the helicopter had lent the Perseverance a hand looking for signs of ancient life at Jezero Crater on the Red Planet. The four-pound helicopter arrived on Mars on February 14, attached to the bottom of the Perseverance, becoming the first object to make a flight on another world on April 19. The first series of flights were increasingly complex field tests to show how alien helicopters can fly around where wheeled vehicles cannot.
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But on Monday, NASA engineers pushed the boundaries of creativity further than ever. In 166 seconds, Ingenuity flew nearly 11 mph for nearly half a mile, or 2,050 feet — a far greater distance than his last flight in June, which was 525 feet. The helicopter circled various corners of the city of Sittah, taking photos of the boundaries, where the intersections between the various rock formations — called contacts, in geology parlance — represent some of the most scientifically intriguing targets in the tenacious search for fossilized microbial life.
“This was a huge leap – Big Leap – in terms of what we’ve done before. We went between sites that were 620,625 meters apart, which is a huge number compared to what we were doing before,” the chief pilot of Ingenuity Harvard Grip said in an interview. Ingenuity imagery, expected in the coming days after a journey through a delayed data pipeline from Mars, will help Back to Earth, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are working to determine whether to send a perseverance on a path to sample rock samples in that contact zone. collect.
The mission statement is “designed with high risk, high reward, which means it makes sense for us to take this extra risk because of the potential rewards,” Grip said.
Originally designed to fly short trips from point A to B, the ingenuity plunged into one of Setah’s eroded craters, slowed its speed and climbed the slopes for the first time as it danced along a winding path. The autonomous navigation algorithms were written to only anticipate flights over flat terrain, so engineers modified the blade and convinced the helicopter that the Setah’s rugged features were flat. This required several simulations in preparation for the flight, essentially predicting whether the helicopter could spiral out of control under its new flight directions. There were no accidents and Ingenuity managed to reach the intended rock formation on the other side of Séítah.
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“This was the first time we really said, ‘Let’s go too far, let’s take a risk and cross Sittah’, which we know is very difficult terrain to traverse in a rover,” Ken Williford, deputy project scientist at Mission Perseverance said in an interview.
Sending a small drone over a potentially dangerous field of thick sand to search for cold Martian rocks is a huge time saver for the persistence team. “If scientists can get those images of this compound early, we can start the scientific process much earlier than we otherwise would, and start making observations and interpretations and understanding what those rocks are,” Williford says.
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The rover has its own cameras, designed primarily to analyze nearby rocks and views of Mars. Sensors aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a satellite 255 miles above the surface of Mars, give the Perseverance team images of rocky targets that are far away but lack the close-up detail a helicopter like Ingenuity can provide.
The helicopter will retire after the first five air shows, allowing the Perseverance team to focus on its own business. But after Ingenuity passed its fourth flight in late April, the engineers decided that: Expand the craft mission on Mars to show how helicopters can help future pioneers carry out science. Some of the mid-flight photos of Ingenuity taken during the test flights were appropriate for persistent scientists, but Monday’s flight marked the first time it had taken off with a single mission to aid the rover’s science team.
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Williford said NASA leadership has agreed to expand the Ingenuity mission provided it does not disrupt or disrupt the primary Perseverance mission. Since then, a small “interface” team of engineers from Perseverance and Creativity, serving as an operational glue between the two tasks, has expanded to include persistent scientists whose innovation has proven to be more scientifically beneficial than expected. For most NASA missions, these interface teams sometimes cause controversy and contention as excited scientists negotiate technical risks with more risk-averse spacecraft engineers. Williford says the team’s creativity and perseverance is surprisingly smooth.
“This was a very unique interaction, where I can go in there and say, ‘You know what would be cool? If we can get here, listen to Bob Balaram [Ingenuity’s chief engineer] Say, “Yeah, let’s do that!” “It really pushes his team forward,” said Williford, who also serves as director of the Astrobiochemistry Laboratory at JPL. “It was really one of the most fun things I’ve ever done. Working with these engineers and a few other scientists to plan these trips honestly makes me feel like a 12-year-old again.”
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